Friday, March 8, 2013

Today’s announcement of JDSU’s acquisition of Arieso, a UK
based, location analytics company, demonstrates an industry movement to obtain new
sources of intelligence about the performance and usage of mobile networks. The migration from voice to data services
has left mobile operators blind to how networks, applications and services are
being used by consumers – a gap that the vendor community is anxious to fill.

To fill this gap, it turns out that there are three main sources
of data within mobile networks from which analytics and intelligence can be
built through network and device monitoring – each have their own benefits and considerable challenges.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Two separate but interconnecting news stories this week: The
announcement that mobile operators including Telefonica, Telenor, America Movil
and Deutche Telecom all plan to bring Firefox OS to market in new smartphones; and
HP finally sold webOS to LG for use in smart TVs.

The connection?
webOS was based on the premise that beyond basic phone features, all
content, games, media and services could and should be delivered through the
web (as web apps), not with native applications installed on the phone. Firefox
OS as a new player to the smartphone arena also thinks HTML 5 based web apps will unlock the
walled gardens built by Google and Apple around Android and iOS, because you
don’t need to go to an app store to use a web app.

The logic is certainly sound – for developers in the HTML 5/JavaScript world, it doesn’t matter if you are using a PC, a Mac an iPad or an
Android phone, with some minor adjustments for screen size, you only need to
develop for one platform. Lamentably,
it didn’t work out for Palm/HP so what is different now and why have a litany
of mobile operators signed-up?

This story is ultimately about control and ownership of services
that mobile operators feel are being ceded to Google, Apple and OTT
(over-the-top) content players. For
mobile operators, having a customizable smartphone environment they can call
their own, together with their powerful distribution channels places their
brands back in the driving seat of service innovation.

Because of the openness and use of HTML 5 & JavaScript
across all aspects of the device – even the dialer –mobile operators should be
able to integrate Firefox OS tightly with the network to take advantage of investments
being made in technologies such as VoLTE and RCS (rich communication services),
essentially showcasing their own services over OTT players. For consumers, the operator’s own web app
store will be the first (but not only) port of call for new applications and
services, providing additional revenue sources.
We can see why this begins to look like a “get well plan” for ARPU
growth.

So will developers jump on the HTML 5 development bandwagon,
or stay hitched to iOS and Android? It
turns out that many of the apps available today are coded as web apps in HTML 5,
cunningly disguised as native apps and packaged for iOS and Android. For the developer community, this makes for
easy portability between platforms. It’s
also a strategy adopted by Blackberry for fast ramp-up of their app portfolio in
Blackberry 10 OS. The challenge has been
performance and integration – web apps run more slowly than native apps and historically,
you couldn't access all the cool smartphone features such as multitouch. This has largely been addressed, but with
the compromise that developers may need to modify code differently to
access the “smart” features of different operating systems.

There have also been discussions about the low price point
of Firefox OS devices allegedly making them ideal for South American and Asian
markets. However, given shared
components and specifications, it seems unlikely that Android smartphones would
be any more expensive than Firefox OS smartphones (short of operator subsidy) meaning
that the two operating systems will likely duke it out, market by market.

So the difference between webOS and Firefox OS and critically,
the potential for Firefox OS success is largely about timing and
messaging. Mozilla and Firefox OS are seen by mobile operators
as a required strategic counter to Android and Apple hegemony. Further, Mozilla’s ethos is attractive in a
way that HP never could be, primarily because mobile operators don’t believe
that Mozilla will ever compete with them for brand status or control of the
eco-system.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Another year and another heralding of IPv6 – 2013, the year
where IPv4 addresses finally ran out and IPv6 becomes mainstream - perhaps. Despite the skepticism, there are genuine
reasons why this year could see your new shiny smartphone on an IPv6 network and for mobile operators at least, for the next few years migration from IPv4 is more pressing than deploying SDN.

It comes down to a twist on the original reason we were
supposed to move to IPv6 – the lack of new IPv4 addresses to handout to newly
minted smartphones.

By the time mobile operators came around to enabling IP
networking for mobile devices, most public IPv4 addresses had been gobbled-up
by the fixed-line world. But instead of
jumping into the brave new world of IPv6, mobile operators punted - instead
issuing “private” IPv4 addresses to customers.
That is, addresses that can only
be used on internal networks and are not valid on the global Internet. This worked because mobile operators then purchased
Carrier-grade network address translation (NAT) gateways from the likes of
Cisco and Juniper, which mapped many individual private IPv4 addresses to one
public IPv4 address, just like the Wi-Fi/ADSL router in your home, but for
millions of devices. In this way, the
scarce public IPv4 address space has been used efficiently and the industry has
been saved from making the IPv6 leap.

Sweetening the deal, an unintended security benefit came to
pass. By deploying NAT in the carrier
network, it’s as if your smartphone doesn’t really exist on the public Internet
unless the smartphone itself makes a connection. So unlike your fixed line connection with a
public IPv4 address, where anyone at anytime can reach your device and attempt
to break-in, your smartphone is inherently secure from unsolicited traffic. Don’t get me wrong, you might still catch
viruses from email, install rouge applications and the like, but your phone is
shielded from the daily exposure of having a device on the internet.

So did procrastinating on IPv6 work or is there a sting in
the tail?

It turns out there are limits to the number of private IP
addresses that can exist on the same private network. That number is shy of 22 million addresses (which
includes an additional 4 million, added for carrier-grade-NAT applications in
2012). There is a growing club of mobile
operators who have way more than 22 million “always on” IP subscribers and they
face some pretty stark choices: They can
break-up the network into areas, reusing the same address space by city or
region; they can unofficially “borrow” IPv4 addresses not currently being
deployed in the real world, run them on their private network and hope they
never show-up on the public internet (at least one major US operator has been
doing this); or they can migrate to IPv6.
Pick your poison.

The “break-up your network into regions and reuse the same
address space” solution has been gaining the most traction, with operators pooling
users into groups of 4 million. So, in a network of 40 million customers, this
means that 10 customers will share the exact same IP address at the same time. This creates headaches for wiretap
requirements, back-endanalytics systems and cross network traffic routing between subscribers (how many
NAT hops is too many?). Further, as
smartphone users today have more active applications running on their smartphone
(talk+map+messaging+game) and enable them as hotspots, this places extra processing
burdens (read financial costs) on scaling NAT.

Cynically perhaps, the end game for IPv4 was only ever going
to come when we simply ran out of runway, when staying with IPv4 became too
painful, making IPv6 deployment the only way forward. Writing one more check for yet more NAT
gateway equipment has become like buying another “final” bottle of Jack for
your deadbeat Uncle – we all know that an intervention is the only way forward
but are waiting for something dramatic to go wrong first.

It is not as if the industry hasn’t been working behind the
scenes to get ready – most RFPs, most equipment specifications have required
IPv6 native support for years now.
However, it was expected that our devices would run both IPv4 and IPv6
in “dual-stack” mode that would ease the path to an IPv6-only world. The Mac on which I type this is busy
searching (in vain) for an IPv6 network, as it communicates in IPv4.

The implications for hitting the NAT wall are startling
though – you really can’t hand out another IPv4 address, private or public.
The switch to IPv6, at least
for new customers and new devices must be absolute. No IPv4 address for your new smartphone. For many operators reaching these IPv4
scaling limits, the transition point to IPv6 is likely to be alongside LTE
and/or VoLTE deployment, as these technologies represent a natural transition
and technology shift in the network.
This will also ensure plenty of time for testing.

So can you deploy an IPv6-only mobile network and will users
notice? Well yes and no. The challenge is to make the network
transparent to applications and services and there are two critical locations
in the network where this will play out.
First, those Carrier grade NAT gateways now have to translate between
the IPv6 world of your network to the public IPv4 world – you’ve solved the
scaling challenge but the rest of the world needs to catch-up and until it
does, this forms the connection to any public website or service not operating
in IPv6.

Second, and something of a larger challenge is that the
handset/smartphone itself needs to provide the appearance of having IPv4 when
it doesn't or alternatively force all applications on the handset to be
IPv4/IPv6 agnostic. Operators sometimes
forget that while they can mandate handset manufacturers and equipment vendors
to comply with their specifications, application vendors live outside this
realm. A popular app that breaks on an IPv6 only network will cause support
complications and user frustration.

A way around this is to bring NAT inside the phone itself
and for any application that needs to think it is on an IPv4 network to provide
a private address that is translated to IPv6 in the phone. Such a method exists – at least in draft in draft-mawatari-v6ops-464xlat. Example code has already been written for
Android and inclusion in new smartphones would go a long way in smoothing the
IPv6 transition. Notwithstanding, application vendors, with a
little prodding from the likes of Apple and Google must be encouraged not to
hardcode IP addresses into their software but to use domain names (so
www.kirinsolutions.com, not 207.155.253.5).
As a consequence, the first operators that make the IPv6 only transition
are likely to go through a few application challenges in the first 3-6 months
of operations as consumers.

Finally, let’s go back to the security benefit of all the
NAT currently going on in the IPv4 world.
When you smartphone shows up with a public IPv6 address, it becomes
accessible to the outside world, just as your ADSL gateway is at home on IPv4. Your ADSL gateway likely has a firewall and
it’s own NAT functionality to protect your PCs and wireless LAN connected
devices from the big bad Internet.
Handset manufacturers and operators are going to have to think carefully
about what level of exposure this represents. Operators may well need to provide a firewall
service in the network to afford the same level of protection, now delivered
through NAT.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

It
is amazing the steps we take to put our smartphones on to Wi-Fi rather than
burn through precious data plans.Short
of forcing consumers into a game of Twister, there are few things more convoluted
(or frustrating) than using a smartphone to type usernames, passwords or credit
card numbers, while sitting in an airport lounge or coffee shop juggling a hot
drink.Still, this learnt behavior can
be seen anywhere a smartphone is out in public.

This
complexity was meant to have been solved years ago with a protocol called WISPr
– a first attempt at standardizing and automating connectivity to Wi-Fi such
that, as consumers, we would never have to deal with pesky web login forms and
endless service menus. Unfortunately, this
protocol never made the headway expected and as a result, only with isolated effort
(think AT&T Wi-Fi access in the iPhone) has automatic Wi-Fi connectivity
become available to consumers out-of-the-box.

In
the absence of a concerted mobile operator, equipment and smartphone vendor push,
independent Wi-Fi operators and app developers stepped into the fray providing
proprietary “islands” of automated connectivity. Consumers typically download an app to
their smartphone, sign-up for a plan and then hope that where they go, service
is available. Some of the networks are
big – Boingo have 600,000 hotspots, Fon have over 5 million through crowd
sourcing, and Devicescape claim 12 million “curated” hotspots – each company with
a slightly different business model. Operators
such as T-Mobile, Orange and PCCW have all built-out their own large-scale Wi-Fi
networks, often available independent from a mobile contract, always with
accompanying iPhone and Android applications.

This
is all set to change with the somewhat low-key arrival of new standards and
products wrapped-up in what is known variously as Hotspot 2.0, 802.11u and Passpoint. All are, confusingly, part of the same
initiative – an industry accepted method for automatically authenticating and
connecting Wi-Fi users using the SIM cards of their smartphones (or cameras,
toys or cars for that matter). There
are a number of additional compelling features too. Encryption to the hotspot comes as standard
and there is a hotspot advertising feature which allows venues or locations
such as stadiums or shopping malls to provide location specific Wi-Fi that
might connect you to a specific web site through an icon that appears on your
smartphone.

What’s
different this time around and why we should see traction is that the industry,
through the Wi-Fi Alliance, has been busy certifying infrastructure products from
companies such as Aruba, Ruckus, Cisco and BellAir, along with chipset and
handset vendors such as Intel, Qualcomm, Marvell, LG and Samsung.

Of
course, just because products are now available doesn’t mean we can get
connected tomorrow. Niels Jonker, Chief
Scientist at Boingo, speaking at CES last month claimed that roll-out would likely
take from now through 2015. Importantly
though, having the entire ecosystem participate should mean that when you
purchase a smartphone with an operator contract, any Wi-Fi hotspot which has a
roaming agreement with your operator should (over this time period) allow
automatic and seamless connectivity.

This
brings us to an interesting position for mobile operators and their focus on
Wi-Fi. The assumption has been that
consumers with smartphones will pay for both a voice and a data plan. Increasingly, this is turning out not to be
the case, especially in countries such as India, China and Indonesia where
smartphones are becoming every bit as popular as the US and Europe. Consumers are buying the same pre-paid voice
plans as before, but exclusively leveraging Wi-Fi for their data.

This
is creating a “dammed if you do / dammed if you don’t” moment for operators. Remember – the master industry plan involves
delivering LTE to everyone everywhere and Wi-Fi expenditure by operators today
is a fraction of the tens of billions being poured into 3G & 4G network
upgrades. From the operator’s perspective, the best
consumer buys service but doesn’t use it – a good reason operators have
encouraged Wi-Fi off-load but a strategy that might be working a little too
well. If consumers have unlimited
Wi-Fi and limited 3G/4G data – more automated and ubiquitous Wi-Fi will lead to
less revenue for the operators.

For
this reason, we are likely to see changes in how mobile operators bill for
Wi-Fi as the lines between 3G/4G and Wi-Fi blur. To put this another way – Wi-Fi has been a
method for keeping users off precious 3G/4G connections but going forward, it
will be integrated into seamless service where the consumer won’t know or care
if they are on LTE or Wi-Fi. Further, as voice services migrate to VoLTE –
which by the way works just fine on quality WiFi networks – Wi-Fi and/or LTE
deployment will be a cost choice decision for the operators based on cell size,
density and available frequency bandwidth. Operator Wi-Fi will finally come in
from the cold.

This
leaves Wi-Fi only players in a different position too. They will
need to leverage their global alliance networks to become full-service players and
deliver voice too. Last month’s FCC announcement
by Julius Genachowski to free-up unlicensed spectrum for Gigabit Wi-Fi will
surely aid in this progression and lower costs for entry, at least here in the
US.

In
many parts of the world, we will likely see LTE and Wi-Fi go head-to-head, especially
in high bandwidth and small cell deployments where cost is a primary
consideration. Indeed, I am reminded of
the battle fought in the 90s over desktop connectivity. Numerous vendors bet against Ethernet, with
Token Ring, Fiber Channel and even ATM. They lost not because they had inferior
technology but because Ethernet price points and the ubiquity of Ethernet devices
ruled the day. In the “Internet of
things” the volume of connected devices will be many times more than the volume
of smartphones and these “things”, for cost and availability reasons will
likely have Wi-Fi, not LTE. Putting
the next billion Wi-Fi devices on service contracts is the next open space.

For
reference, below is a link to a list of Passpoint products certified by the Wi-Fi
Alliance:

Monday, January 28, 2013

2012 will likely go down as
the year where VoIP apps reached critical mass in mobile networks.The roll-out of LTE networks in the US and key
cities in Asia, along with the near ubiquity of Wi-Fi have been a key
enabler.Smartphone apps such as Viber,
Fring, Line2 and established fixed line alternatives including Skype and Vonage
are slowly migrating voice minutes from mobile operator’s traditional services
to VoIP.Perhaps most notable of all is
Viber, who between May and June of 2012 added 20 million users to their subscriber
pool, ending the year at 140 million subscribers.Their subscribers are not the silent type
either - collectively they sent each other two billion texts and rack-up 1.5
billion minutes of talk time per month.

This trend has surely not
gone unnoticed in Mobile Operator HQs.
According to Yankee Group, global mobile voice and messaging revenue are
set to decline by $1B per month through 2013 and operators have been thinking
through strategies to mitigate this loss.
The answer, at least for Verizon and AT&T has been to charge more
for data and device connectivity, bundling unlimited voice and text. This may
seem crazy given how much revenue is generated directly from voice today but
clearly demonstrates the threat that OTT players represent when operators don’t
bundle services. The genius here is that it disincentivizes
the use of over-the-top VoIP applications and creates a puzzle for competitors
such as Sprint and T-Mobile who, to-date have benefited from their
all-you-can-eat data plans, growing their average-revenue-per-user (ARPU) in the process.

South Korean mobile operators
have seen firsthand the impact of all-you-can-eat data tied with fixed minute
calling plans. Back in April 2011, a
local company, KAKAO launched a messaging app called KakaoTalk – a homegrown Korean
version of the popular SMS alternative WhatsApp.Last year, 38 million local subscribers were happily
texting each other for free (the population of South Korea is close to 50
million people).In June of 2012 KAKAO
enhanced their offering to deliver a full-blown voice service between their
subscribers – for free. The outcome was
extraordinary.Taking advantage of the
cheap, unlimited data plans of the local operators, within three days of
service launch, subscribers were generating 20 million calls per day.

Seeing a massive spike in
data volume and a precipitous drop in voice revenue, the South Korean mobile operators
moved to action within days and began throttling and then blocking VoIP traffic
over their network, obtaining the blessing of the Korean Communications
Commission to block or charge more for VoIP services.It will be fascinating to see if KAKAO and
others move to hide or tunnel VoIP traffic through encryption, VPNs and port
shifting, creating a cat-and-mouse game between network operator and
application vendor.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Korean
operators are not the only ones with a block-and-tackle approach.Vodafone has also moved to block VoIP
traffic to subscribers who aren’t on their higher-rate post-pay plans and we
can expect other operators to take the same approach, where regulation permits.

With large volumes of over-the-top
voice traffic now running across mobile networks and with the fixed-line world
as a case-study, the long-term outcome of Telco voice is certainly unclear.What is certain is that Operators will take
advantage of LTE technologies to offer superior voice and video services of
their own. The question then, is can
they deploy these services fast enough, (before users migrate to the app world)
and will consumers really care?

It must be said there is a
natural protection mechanism available for most mobile operators which slows-down
migration, and creates a challenge for any VoIP start-up – it is called The Community-of-Interest
Problem.Your cell phone can reach
anybody else on the planet with a phone – Viber, at least today – cannot – that
is, not without having you pay to reach the legacy telephone world per call or
in pre-purchased minutes.The reason
KAKAO in Korea could be successful so quickly was that they already had most of
the population of Korea on their texting service.In the US, perhaps only Apple (with FaceTime)
has this community-of-interest leverage.On this note, it is also important to understand the role of the handset
manufacturer in this equation.When
you consider voice as just another app on the smartphone, the voice app that
ships with the device is the one that is going to be used by the majority of
consumers.If it works, is free (or
included in the tariff plan), allows consumers to communicate with their friends
and family, has fall-back to legacy technology and allows you to reach
emergency services, then inertia dictates that these consumers won’t look
further afield.

What is fascinating then is
that for Mobile Operators, the driver for VoLTE adoption is not to compete with
the OTT players per se.Rather, the move
to VoIP services frees up valuable spectrum currently dedicated to voice in the
2G and 3G bands.This spectrum can
then be assigned to data services to feed consumer’s insatiable demand for
bandwidth.As an added benefit, the
operators eventually get to switch-off the expensive legacy voice systems and
run a single, unified IP network.

From a consumer perspective, VoLTE
will be touted as a higher quality service and voice will be just one of a
number of components including video, text, presence and location. Mobile operators will push for these RCS (rich
communication services) to be integrated with smart phone functionality, so for
example, your phonebook will show who is available to talk or if a voice call
can be changed to a video call. While
their original plan may well have been to charge individually for each service,
the required bundling of SMS with basic consumer plans may well be resetting
expectations. As an example, MetroPCS announced back in
October an RCS service called joyn – available on specific LTE handsets
in their network. Pulling-in application developers, AT&T
announced earlier this month an API, allowing developers to integrate their
apps with AT&T’s IMS architecture, paving the way for joint services and
revenue sharing.

So in 2013 we will continue
to see OTT players and handset manufacturers (but not likely many operators) drive
VoIP services and consumer adoption of these services will likely dictate
outcomes.Any player with a large enough
community-of-interest, bundled with a handset partnership could make significant
traction – Facebook anyone?Operators will begin to roll-out VoLTE services as both the LTE networks
and handsets with VoLTE calling capabilities reach consumers.The race for subscribers for both OTT
services and VoLTE through 2015 will likely define our industry for the next
10-15 years.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Over the last few years, mobile operators and vendors have
turned their attention to improving the quality and reliability of the
performance of networks, of handsets and of services. Unfortunately, in that time, many existing
tools and products have simply been rebranded with a “Customer Experience
Management” and “Big Data” brush, aligning them, at least in marketing terms,
towards helping reduce the industry’s perennial problem : customer attrition or
churn which in most markets runs at an alarming 2% - 4% of subscribers per
month.

In order to address customer satisfaction (which aside from
pricing is often the biggest factor in churn), mobile operators are tasked with
improving the quality of their network, and the quality of support provided
when consumers call with a problem. To
do this, operators need information – information on the performance of
services, of devices, of networks. Now
you would think that operators have a large of amount of data which could be
analyzed and understood to improve services but here lies a paradox – the more
complex and heterogeneous the networks become, the more management data is
generated, the more difficult it is to get the right information at the right
time and make it actionable. To put it
another way, operators now have way too much information, often of the wrong
type, to make business decisions and improve customer satisfaction. This
is perpetuated by traditional Telco vendors who are focused on delivering yet
more information from more systems, backhauling terabytes of management traffic
from across the network under the illusion that if you throw enough processing
power at the data, you can yield those illusive answers to subscriber woes.

Perhaps this isn't surprising when you consider where we've come from. In the good old days of
network management, you’d display a big map of your network, usually overlaid
on a map of the country (or the globe) and any problems would blink, flash or
alarm red. Fix the red flashing light
and life was good. Then networks and
services became more complex – think 2G,3G,4G, Wi-Fi, smartphone,
machine-to-machine all with overlaid services.
To deliver a single service such as email or a mapping app or a web
search requires the cooperation of many different systems, networks and
companies. The flashing red light, as a
key performance indicator went away because we lost an end-to-end understanding
of our services. To date, as an
industry we really haven’t really implemented a good alternative.

As it turns out then, finding the new “red light” means
looking at the network from a user experience perspective – how each
application is performing for each subscriber at key points across the
network. Aggregate this information in
real-time and you recreate the red light map with a new paradigm – performance
by application, by market, by service, by subscriber type, by revenue generated.

Thinking through this problem, Vistapointe, a start-up focused
on network insights, have figured out how to build this performance dashboard
without having to backhaul and then analyze huge amounts of traffic from each
node or location in the network. Their
method relies on placing Vistapointe Intelligence Packet Engines (VIPEs) at
strategic points in the network where, based on location, they analyze and
process only the critical information necessary to extract performance data,
relaying not raw packet captures, but summarized and compressed information to the
cloud where it is aggregated with information from other nodes to build a
complete picture of each application and service in near real-time. By
performing much of the data analysis deep in the network, they've made the
solution naturally scalable as servers in the cloud are concerned only with
aggregation and not with packet processing.

The outcome of reinventing the mobile operator’s dashboard
is that, for the first time, mobile operators can understand how each and every
application on their network is performing – both those they own and monetize
and those of partners and content providers - and when it doesn't perform,
understand what went wrong and the impact to subscribers, to services and to
revenue.